reports & html status

[Bill Gribble]

On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 09:25:17AM +1100, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> > I will put one together this afternoon.
> OK.  

Would you believe... THIS afternoon?  

I think that may have been a wasted cultural reference.  Do you guys
get a 60's TV spy show called "Get Smart"?  This was a formative
television experience for me and is probably responsible for my love
of gadgets :)

> I need an interface that lets me create a reportwindow, stuff a report
> into it, delete it, set the report options, and pass in a popup menu.

Would it be OK for the report options to be under the reportwindow's
control?  ATM editing report preferences is one of the report's popup
menu options.  I'm thinking about adding another special URL type to
pop up a report preferences editor, which I think would be a
convenient shortcut.

> In the interface to the virtualised mainwindow-account-tree widget, I
> pass in a GnomeUIInfo *, have you done something else?

I could support that, though I don't ATM.  I'll get that in before I
send your patch. 

> The frippery around the edges would essentially be done with
> template replacement, but the table would be done in a programmatic
> way.

Are tables that much different from other HTML structure?  I
understood that you were thinking about much more than just a table
generator.  And generating embedded graphs is both fairly different
from making a table and much more than 'frippery'.

> OK, if you want to do that, how about talking the biggest, nastiest
> 'reporting analysis' question - calculating Return On Investment
> (ROI) in shares and mutual funds. . .

I'll have to think about that a bit :) I agree that figuring out how
to solve that one will provide a lot of insight into the Right Way
that will work for other, simpler reporting problems.

> We can insist that all the reports use styles specified in a style
> sheet, and perhaps generate that style sheet on the fly based on
> global/local options.  That could perhaps be provided as a
> "generate-header" function.  I don't know exactly what style sheets
> gtkhtml supports.

Here's the big problem: gtkhtml supports exactly NO style sheets.

On the upside, it CAN render Slashdot reasonably well, so it's not
without its abilities.  On the downside, as long as visually-intense
sites like slashdot are not using CSS, there's no way gtkhtml will
support it.

I think we need to have a Plan B in place, which means figuring out
some way to make our own style sheets.  Since we control the
generation of the HTML, we can embed as much as we want in the way of
fancy explicit layout, if we only know what to do; we may just need to
define a simple scheme 'style' API.

Looking at the W3C examples in
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.2.3 gives me the
idea that we could do something similar to CSS at HTML generation
time.  We would just do it by 'macro expansion' rather than relying on
the browser to do it.  Have a look and let me know what you think.

b.g.